Dev Tracker - Discussion

I mean, there's a middle ground here. Nickeny probably couldn't do a better job than SE could, but that doesn't mean they're doing an amazing job. Many of their decisions make sense in the context of their constrained budget and technical debt. Many of them don't.

They could absolutely do better if they had someone who genuinely understood and loved the game working on it. Bonus points if that person can also program. But, it's not exactly realistic to expect SE to find that perfect person for a game that's essentially a rounding error on their balance sheet.

Fujito kinda is that guy though, I don't have any doubt he loves FFXI deeply. He's had plenty of time to study under Matsui and Ito and even Tanaka.

I can't say with any proof, but I still have a sneaking feeling he's under Yoshida's thumb for anything and everything.

I mean that's the jist of it.

Any of you think you'd do a "better job". Don't understand ***. Even if you had great ideas, you'd be doing the exact same things, because the suit above you told you to do it.

99% of you would be fired within a month anyway. Not understanding retention and metrics are priority one. XI is an asset first and a game a distant second, maybe third.

one thing you will notice if you look at what's credited to him here, no (or minimal) battle content.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Yoji_Fujito

Isn't this the guy who kept posting about his abusive year-long relationship with Bumba now coming back and calling people addicts?

First thing I'd do as the Genius Community manager is to create a Nickeny trust that doesn't do ***like SE has been.

Second, and this is a good one,

Tbh they should just add i119 Abyssea. That's loads of battle content ready to be recycled.

That's it?

That's basically what escha was already


That would have been an option but would so "terribly" nerf the player and their wsd bloat and we cant just do that

So...you think that Sortie was designed specifically for 6-boxers? I wonder where in the world you got that idea.

Frankly, I would say that the reason Limbus sucks so badly is because SE listened to the community, who are a bunch of morons.

They wanted an event that can be done solo, or done with a group up to an alliance. That's what everyone keeps saying: they want to play FFXI solo (because they *** refuse to talk to another human); they also *** that 6-man events are the devil, because they paradoxically have 7-10 friends and can't fit them into their 6-man group.

So SE designed dogshit-level content with no difficulty because, as I've been saying for years, it's basically impossible to make content that is difficult for 1-6 people and also difficult for 18 players. So we end up with this absolute steaming pile of boring, easy, repetitive ***.

Congratulations community, now we have "old school" 18-man content, and you can also solo it! Everyone's happy!

I dont think when SE made Sortie, they built it with the expectation that groups would be doing 8NM+Aminon on a regular basis

So just build alliance content, scale the difficulty for 6-10 players, and let the players figure out the optimal ways.

I do agree with Maletaru that there is a challenge designing content for parties vs. alliances, but historically it happened the other way around. Delve was pretty tough 18man. Then comes delve 2 and 6man groups can clear it trivially. Same for escha/aeonic NMs. Bringing more people is an actual liability because of the extra HP and increased number of people in range of nasty TP moves, which occur more frequently.

Can you not picture the pure chaos of 18man Aminon, or god forbid Gartell, as it is currently done? Much more coordination required and probably harder to recover from big mistakes as well.

Dyna-D works perfectly well as challenging 18man content, btw.

HP scaling is a shitty mechanic because it implies every character has an equal impact on DPS.

If you want to do HP scaling, it should be a smaller increase as you add more.

Generally speaking, everyone present should be there with the goal of increasing the party/alliance's DPS

I don't think any of the latest content had anything really planned out. Seems so okish before the 6-month grind was implemented - now we have round 2 with Limbus. Maybe we deserve this content because we didn't fight back

This is not what I said though. I said "it implies every character has an equal impact on DPS", and I would like to believe you're smart enough to know that a WHM has a much lesser impact on DPS than a DD job does.

Back in the day, SE reduced the experience points required to level at the higher end down to something more reasonable. This was done because they could look at the numbers and see that people were lagging behind or falling off at a certain point. Players weren't botting for days on end to overcome the steep curve so SE could actually look at the data and make the correct choice.

Today, that data is saturated with people botting for days on end, paying mercs/RMT to accelerate their progress or creating tons of alts to convert XI to single player game. Why is anyone surprised that SE has no clue what to do anymore? People think they're getting over, but they're making it worse...

I agree with your point, but I guess for me it's the difference between Data and Anecdata. The data can paint a picture, but it can't tell you the experiences.

I'm not sure if it's reasonable to have people hired in a ... however old FFXI is now game, who play it at a level and are able to report their findings. Or running frequent, player based qualitative surveys.

But it's clear that Data is not enough to give an impression of what the modern game actually is to people.

The first WHM has a much greater impact on DPS than the DD job does. Party stays alive, damage stays up.

If you want to add 12 additional WHMs then sure, HP scaling is kind of bad for you. But, my experience has been that aside from 1hr zergs any real player who's making an effort is worth the HP scaling they add. Idle mules aren't.

Data isn't enough because there are too many *** here willing to contaminate it.

Vana'Bout 1? SE set a goal for upgrades based on prior participation. The problem was that the prior month was the frog ambuscade. Players create/reactivate tons of alts/mules during this month and carry them all through the content for spoils. How are they supposed to know how much of the frog ambuscade is actual players participating and how much is noise?

Sorry, it's just depressing reading so many comments about how SE is *** up when it's actually us not taking responsibility for how much we contribute to them *** up.

Have fun with all your alts next month in ambuscade.

So if you take less of the drug, the hit later will be better.

Yeah.. don't see that working.

If you take all the drugs now, you don't have any left for later.

My initial point was working under the presumption you werent an idiot building a party of DD DD DD BRD COR GEO to bring to meaningful content, and somewhere in there was an actual healer.

I also never said a WHM is a zero impact to DPS, I said "lesser". Realistically, there are maybe 2-3 jobs that can contribute meaningfully as the 7th outlier:
GEO (if the content doesnt have debuff nerfs)
RDM (debuffs and Haste can be done outside of PT)
BLM (if the DD's arent spamming WS)

DD's contribution to DPS will take a hit compared to the others as theyre likely not getting buffs
Healer wont be doing much
Any other support wont have anyone to buff

Adding more people smacking the target leads to the target becoming more dangerous, so its not a net gain to bring more people.


I still stand by how its a shitty mechanic. They introduced it in Delve, then got rid of it for Vagary (another alliance content that doesnt need an alliance), then brought it back for Geas Fete.

All WHM content clearing?? Please don't threaten me with a good time. Anyone else want in? :D

content scaling(esp when it starts as low as 4 people) defeats the entire purpose of party based content. It's a horrible mechanic that shouldn't have ever been introduced, which their is no logical justification for it. If it start at 7+ that would be a different story cause then u could justify it a little bit. But party scaling at under 7 defeats the entire purpose of party based content and encourages people to leave people out, and punishes people for teaming up.

If your goal is to have the easiest content, beat it, and acquire things, then sure. Scaling makes content harder and it punishes you for bringing people who don't contribute. I've never once thought 'this person isn't worth the extra HP' unless the person was completely and thoroughly undergeared to the point they probably shouldn't be doing the content anyway.

It also allows SE to design the content with a difficulty level that makes it doable by 6 without being a cakewalk for 18. If you want to play the game, rather than just be handed things, it's a feasible way for them to increase flexibility without throwing out difficulty. Content that allows 18 and can be beaten by 6 is joke content.

You are right. had a guy join our linkshell today instantly wanted to skip all odyssey content and go straight for nyame... with all his gear unaugmented and some pieces 109.

This sounds like your concern is "but RMT will sell spots"?? Even if you're not directly saying it in those words, we all know what "people who don't contribute" means.
I'm pretty sure a few months ago multiple people told me that RMT are already selling spots in Sortie.


Anyways, the difficulty of most content is tied to its TP moves and their frequency. By increasing TP gain on the target, you're increasing the danger the target presents.

Would bringing extra DD's to Aminon be helpful? Sure you can add more Absorb-TP's, but you're also potentially adding more DD's, which will increase the risk of "oops a TP move got off".

Will bringing more people to Sortie in general be helpful? Considering the WS wall is a thing, this is most likely a net-negative as there are only so many viable WS options. By throwing in more WS's, you're also adding in a "oops we accidentally did a bad SC and now were in trouble / completely ***".

Would bringing more people to Gaol be helpful? Considering the job restrictions, its tough to say. Of the 22 jobs, how many of them are actually useful at Ongo? Would bringing extra people to Arebati be beneficial? How about Bumba with 11 or more? Extra DPS on Mboze sounds like a superb idea.


"the game is dying" because HP scaling discourages bringing people. What happens to the bench warmers that are stuck sitting on the sidelines because of strict 6-man content?
1-If all goes well, they get fed up of sitting on the sidelines and find a group. Wonderful, except when someone from the main groups quits and was expecting that bench warmer to jump in, theyre gone and now the whole group is in limbo.
2-They get discouraged and quit.

It's not just buyers, it degrades the game when the de-facto path is to leech the highest content someone will let you leech and skip the rest of the game. Making the highest content very leechable leads to rapid player attrition.

You can always make people useful. You can get more buffs/debuffs with more than 6 players. More people feeding TP does mean you need more absorb-tps, but it also means you have more. And, it reduces the amount of low or no return absorb-TPs, so it buffs your existing players that way too. It does increase risk, but not by nearly as much as it helps.

I mean, if you're absolutely braindead, sure? If you're completely incapable of choosing WS that don't SC and worried about the wall, you can just have them do spirits within. Won't ever SC, still reduces WS wall for everyone else. Or, a smarter group could just run doubles of some good WS to no meaningful negative with that many WS. WS wall only cares about the last 5 WS, not how many times a specific WS was used. First penalty is only 10%, so 2 savage blade users eating a constant 10% penalty is still 1.8x as much savage blade as one savage blade user..

Having extra jobs makes things easier, I don't know how this is hard to understand. More buffs means more damage. More debuffs means more damage. Being allowed an extra body on Ongo means better SCs, which are extremely limited on v25. Another body on Arebati means you can have two supports or an additional buffer.

Sortie and Odyssey aren't designed for alliances, anyway. Odyssey in particular is very clearly designed for 6 and would not work with 7 at all (as you cannot do 3x7 jobs without repeats). Sortie could be unlocked, but why? The only reason you care is because you want to sit your mules in the zone and get galli without any downside.

If there are so many bench warmers, they should group up. Limbus is what you get when you do an 18 man content without restrictions. Nobody is interested in it because the rewards are trash (because it's easy content and can't have great rewards). You want a game that rewards you for existing, that isn't FFXI. There are plenty of games that do that.

Letting the benchwarmers sit half-idle in a Sortie alliance and get +2 gear with no contribution isn't going to keep them engaged long term. If anything, it'll remove their goals and make them bored quicker.